The seagull hangs lifeless and gaunt from a rope. The wind is hard out of the east, leaping over the riprap causeway and flipping the water into neat lines of black and silver. The dead seagull twists in the wind, spins, its eyes now as clouded and gray and lost as the Atlantic skyline.
I stand on an 8-foot by 8-foot feed scow with the lobsterman named Oscar at the tiller. I hold a shovel in my fists. Over a 1,000 pounds of dead fish lie at my feet.
We are being watched by a series of surveillance cameras, and we are surrounded by an electric fence. There is an eagle in a spruce snag and Oscar points a single crooked finger at it as if he knows this bird from all others, and he grumbles, “Asshole.”
The eagle turns its head into the wind, leans forward and spreads its wings and swoops over us, arcs over the harbor and out of sight. Ten feet above us, a series of 100-yard-long nylon cables stretch from one edge of the lobster pound to the other. The cables hang slightly convex, like a drooping ceiling, and the feeling is that of being within an inverted dome with a floor made of seawater. When the wind blows, the cables vibrate and like some massive cello, the lobster pound moans and howls.
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